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What lessons can be learned from the latest cyber attack on the US State Department?
August 2021 by Patrick Houyoux LL.M. ULB, Brussels, Trinity College, Cambridge, UK. President – Director PT SYDECO
The news has just leaked out:
The US State Department was recently the victim of a cyber-attack.
The attack is believed to have taken place a few weeks ago, shortly after a Senate committee warned of the risk of a data breach.
What is surprising is that this is not the first time the State Department has been the subject of a cyber-attack. Indeed, it was one of dozens of federal agencies - and thousands of private data networks (more than 18,000 government and private computer networks) - hit by the massive SolarWinds breach in December 2020.
What then of the computer security lessons learned from the Department of Defense (DOD) "Zero Trust Reference Architecture"(1) and from the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Special Publication 800-207 on "COMPUTER SECURITY" devoted to the ZERO TRUST ARCHITECTURE (2)?
Is this just another example of the famous saying that it is the shoemaker who is the worst shod?
Or should we look further and analyse the content of the American ZERO TRUST concept to understand what has happened?
In fact, a closer look at the concept shows us that it is still focused on human behavior with the training of the staff in charge and the abundant hierarchy of cascading authorizations and privileges.
Is this not the heart of the matter?
We all know that the human factor is the weakest link in the IT security chain. No one is safe from a mistake and when the attacker has access to the credentials of the highest authorities in a system, he has access to everything he wants.
This is why we at PT SYDECO have created a close protection system, totally independent of the human factor and the type of attack, precisely because we are aware of this weakness and because antivirus software only works with a certain delay when it comes to new viruses. We call this system SP-One©.
SP-One© is inspired by the processes and mechanisms of our IMMUNE SYSTEM to protect our computer systems against any external aggression.
Since 29 January 2021, SP-One© has been subject to numerous daily attacks, each one equally unsuccessful. As of August 23, 2021, they totalled 1,117,745 attacks.
No one has succeeded in breaking through the protection of the program that SP-One© protects.
So isn’t the best protection against cyber attacks the integration of SP-One© in a ZERO TRUST architecture using MICRO SEGMENTATION?
(1) Department of Defense (DOD) Zero Trust Reference Architecture
Version 1.0 February 2021 Prepared by the Joint Defense Information Systems
Agency (DISA) and National Security Agency (NSA) Zero Trust Engineering Team
(2)This publication is available free of charge from
https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.SP.800-207
